Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Shane O'Neill writes "Ronald McDonald and the NBC Peacock may get more TV air time, but today's operating systems have cool logos, too. Google, Apple, Microsoft and the Linux crowd crafted mascots ranging from cute lizards to circles of life. In this slideshow, we look at the origins of the logos and look ahead to their future."

Really? Which one? Are we talking primary colors of light or pigment? If I were to "Select Distinct Colors From ColorsOfLight Union Select Distinct Colors From ColorsOfPigment"... what would the resulting set be?

Why not? The human eye has four colour receptors that may cross eachother a little, but is essentially: Red, Green, Blue and Rods (low light). Though the later ismostly used when it is too dark to use the other three.

who the fuck moded you insightful!red, green, blue + red,blue,yellow = red,red,blue,blue,green,yellowif you select only the distinct colors (as GP did), you get red,blue,green,yellowif you count that list, you get FOUR colors

Well, if we want to get technical it is true that red, green, blue, and yellow are all primary colors; RGB being the primary colors of light and yellow being a primary pigment. In all fairness to the writers of TFA, they don't state primary colors of what.

A common slip. When you go to think of base colors like that, it's easy to thing RGB while actually trying to come up with RBY. I don't see why it's so far fetched that one might accidentally toss green in there, and that someone else might not catch it.

Now, as far as that being the reason they contrast well to the eye... I call bullshit. They are all as separated as they can be from each other on the spectrum, so naturally there is high contrast between them.

Ditto. Who cares about anything that includes red and green, when you can't SEE red and green? Phhht. For the most part, I don't give a damn about colors. Give me a dark skin, with high contrast, and I'm happy!

I'd always thought the Red Hat was a reference to De Bono's "Six Thinking Hats" [wikipedia.org]. The IT industry also talks about "black hats" (hackers, appropriately enough the black thinking hat is "judgement"/"identifying flaws") and "white hats" (security folk, although the white thinking hat is actually "neutrality" rather than "vigilantism" or whatever, I assume it's intended as the polar opposite of a "black hat").

PS. Why is the idle section so screwed up? The comment box is narrower than it is tall (and it's only

You would probably see a similar evolution as you see in TV Network logos or logos of other brands. Following the Zeitgeist, they would adapt to what's "cool" or "hip" (or whatever other word is currently hip or cool to describe hip or cool...). In the 50s, they'd have been serious and business-y, in the 60s they would have been down to earth, in the 70s flashy, in the 80s neon-flashy, in the 90s they'd have started spinning and today they'd be "we're too cool for a logo, so we just got this piece of design

Remember, this is the Internet Age, where incomplete, under-researched, poorly written, fluffy snippets of stuff everyone in the target audience already knows is passed off as news.Modern America: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Entertainment.

And lacking BSD, they miss the story of the two Texans reacting to the BSD daemon T-shirt, one of the best stories in BSD history.

Thanks! I had been looking for that story.
Last time I saw it, it was reprinted in an Ericsson company-internal Unix course compendium, under the title "Devil worshipping in Texas".
There, it was illustrated with a three-year-old girl wearing a BSD tshirt and looking mischievous...

I first read it in 'Getting Started with FreeBSD' - a shortened, printed version of the FreeBSD handbook, if I recall correctly. I had to go to a local free software distributor to buy the CD-ROMs and a printed manual. I'm guessing this was 1997 or 98, and I desperately wanted an operating system that wasn't Windows 95. I've still got the disk package floating around somewhere - version 2.2.6.

Agreed, and uninteresting, not deserving space at Slashdot. Lacks also Debian (which is an interesting story, unlike these). The only actual things I've learned is that Microsoft's logo's colors are very "visible", and some RedHat guy wore a red lacrose hat. Fail.

If we're talking about logotypes in general, there's actually quite a lot of interesting reading:

Coke vs. Pepsi branding [underconsideration.com] Paul Rand's staggeringly impressive portfolio [areaofdesign.com] (More here [paul-rand.com]) -- IBM, NeXT, OS/2, ABC, Enron, Westinghouse, and UPS logos were all designed by Rand.Rand also proposed (a fairly swanky) new logo for Ford in the 60s, although the company continues [muscularmustangs.com] to use the same logo that it did in 1912.Famous logo nicknames [identityworks.com] Raymond Loewy designed [raymondloewy.com] quite a few iconic oil company logos (and the US mail!).Best and [underconsideration.com]

If only Adblock had the features of EditCSS and Repaginate combined to present such pages as a single page without redundancy.

If I didn't have to run Firefox 2.0.0.20 on this wretchedly old Redhat 9 system (due to no libpangocairo and too old version of GTK+) I'd be using Stylish to activate style rules on paged sites to hide everything but the story and Repaginate to concatenate all the pages together.

Looking at the high-quality version of that logo, it hit me - it looks a lot like one of those old "Simon" electronic games from the 80s (70s?). I know the game had four colors, and the logo three; but the resemblance is uncanny (to my eyes anyway).

Okay, my comment is neither "news for nerds" nor "stuff that matters"; but then neither was the story.:-P

Depends on which version of primary colors you use. For computer displays, they are : red, green, and blue. For art (painting), they are : red, yellow, and blue. So you could say all are primary colors.

Red, green and blue are the "additive" primary colours--the three primary components to making any colour with sources of light (computer displays and televisions generally emit light, hence the use of the RGB colour model for video media). You got that one right.

However two of the primary colours "for art" yo9u mentioned aren't technically correct (but they have an historical basis). The "subtractive" primary colours are magenta, yellow and cyan. This is where you get the "CMYK" cartriges for your printers. The K is for blacK (I guess it isn't called CMYB because blue already took the letter B...).

The additive and subtractive primary colours have complementary characteristics. If you combine the light from each of the additive primaries you get white. If you combine pigment of each of the subtractive primaries you get black. The subtractive and additive primaries are each exact complementary colours of each other (the complement of one primary is the combination of the other two primaries), hence:

That is how we get the acronyms for the primary colours: RGB is ordered by wavelength and CMY represents the complement of RGB.

Anyways, science hadn't established modern colour theory before much of the work done by renaissance painters was completed--colour theory of that time was based upon observation and aesthetics. They saw rainbows, came up with colour wheels, saw how their pigments blended and such and came up with their own set of primary colours. In this case they divided the colour wheel into FOUR parts and picked four primary colours such that each primary had another primary as a complement (it was all about subtractive colour theory too--they didn't know much about the additive primaries of light to have the six primaries we have now). Those colours are roughly RED, YELLOW, GREEN and BLUE (picked as they are the most prominent in rainbow spectrums observed in nature).

The colours of the Microsoft Windows logo are the four "renaissance painter's primaries". Each pair complements the other and are both bold and pleasing to the eye. The poster ianare is basically right, all four colours are pri,aries in one sense or another, though the details weren't quite complete.

There is no connection between Apple the computer company and Apple the Beatles music company. Not on the name, not on the logo. These two companies even agreed on that at the end of a lengthy lawsuit in the '80s.

I agree. The author says that the colors of the Chrome logo were inspired by the Windows logo. That's ridiculous -- the colors obviously came from the Google logo. Google uses those four colors in almost all its logos. Obviously the author did not actually do any research.

Agree. The author also didn't bother to note that the current Mac OS X box art has a starfield because that comes DIRECTLY from the new Time Machine feature, which was a major selling point for upgrading to Leopard. Instead he goes off on how it reminds him of 2001.

And the writing is sloppy and and vapid and horrid. Normally, I'd suggest to the author, "Don't quit your day job." But in this case, I think it'd be more appropriate to say, "Please quit your day job."

Greetings and Salutations... Notice that this is a website focused at "C" level managers. Not that I am saying that being too accurate can cause their heads to hurt...but....
In any case, there are certain levels of management where one needs fluff to make them feel as if they understand what is going on, yet, not cause them enough confusion that a worried frown might sully their brow.
Regards

Inspirations aside, the Chrome ball is a powerful image on its own. It's no accident that it resembles an eyeball, signifying knowledge and insight.

It's funny, I look at it and see Hal 9000 and skynet bundled together in a deviously delightful, 'Simon Says' resemblance that slips it unwittingly past the fears and vigilance of even the most skeptic late 80's and early 90's children. Signifying knowledge and insight is a simply a crafty way of claiming it is 'All Seeing' without the growing number of web conspiracy theorists sinking their teeth into the new Illuminati search engine overlords. I, for one, feel resistance to welcome them, to don

Why red, green, blue and yellow? They are all primary colors, and contrast well to the human eye

GREEN is NOT a primary color!!! This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Green is a secondary color along with purple and orange, it is made by combining yellow and blue.

I work in the TV industry and so many people believe green is a primary color because they see "RGB" monitors (ok that was a while ago), or the red green and blue connections on HD TVS, "they must all be primary colors". Argh!

There are no magic three color pigments that actually exist to make all other colors. red, blue and yellow as the 'mother' colors is just a construct. as far as those TV's are concerned, using the subtractive method (light, not pigment), Red Green Blue ARE the primary colors, because it uses them to make all others it can. Read up on trichromats. You can use lots of 3 different colors as the primary colors.

Red, green, and blue are the primary colors of light. They are the primary colors because they correspond to the three color receptors in our eyes.

Cyan, magenta, and yellow are the primary colors of ink. They are the *opposites* of red, green, and blue, respectively. Ink works subtractively -- you start from white and remove color -- while light works additively -- you start from black and add. This is why their primary colors are opposites.

That is absurd. We evolved those three specific colors color receptors because they worked reasonably well for distinguishing objects. We could also just as easily have evolved violet, cyan, and orange color receptors.

Ink works subtractively -- you start from white and remove color -- while light works additively -- you start from black and add.

I've never understood why that is. I know red paint reflects red light and green paint reflects green light. I know this because you can paint a black surface and it no longer looks black, so paint doesn't act purely like a filter. It definitely reflects light.

If I mix red and green paint, it seems to me that whenever light happens to hit a red paint molecule the red light component will be reflected and whenever it hits a green paint molecule the green light component will be reflected. If I mix the paints

You are thinking about it the wrong way around. In the magenta pigment, you have particles that absorb yellow light. (All light not absorbed is reflected). In Cyan pigment you have particles that absorb red light. yellow pigment the blue light is absorbed.

You mix the blue and cyan pigments, and the red and blue light is absorbed, leaving only the green light to be reflected.

Well that was disappointing, I was hoping to see images of each version of the Windows logo to show how it evolved, not just a quick description of it with only the latest logo shown. Then the same for Apple and any other company that has gone through years of growth and change. Basically you could have put all the logos on one page and said, "Hey, look at these!" and you would still come away with the same thing.

"... and look ahead to their future."
More like a future where this portion of the article graces us with it's existence! For shame,/. , not your finest hour... And here I was practically salivating at the prospect of laying these peepers on a (needless to say, though say it I must:) very highly anticipated OS-logo-of-the-future design mock-up slideshow. (One day, though...)
For now, however, I'm ever so very marginally outraged!

So many unnecessary pages! and each is so fucking slow to load with all the junk it's filled with. It's much less fun to read a list of things when you have time to tab back to Slashdot and complain in between each item.